Previews

Tom Clancy's EndWar

Ubisoft gives us a whole new kind of strategy game with a control scheme unlike any before it.

Spiffy:

Can play the whole game using just your voice; presents the Tom Clancy game universe in a larger scale.

Iffy:

Unique control system may scare off some gamers; unit movement doesn't look natural.

As time goes by more and more genres that are considered PC staples are making their way to the consoles. It happened with first-person shooters and now it's happening with real-time strategy games. Both genres have control issues on the consoles and while the FPS has made it over relatively well, the RTS has had some teething issues. Ubisoft Shanghai is looking to tackle those issues head-on in Tom Clancy's EndWar.

Like the other games bearing the Tom Clancy brand, EndWar takes place in the near future. Nuclear weapons have been rendered nearly obsolete, but instead of bringing about world peace this development eventually leads to another World War. Michael de Plater, creative director on EndWar, says "We want to make you feel like a real general." This means a departure from traditional RTS games where you can click on individual units and give out individual orders. Micromanagement is kept to a minimum. There are no factories, no refineries, and there is nothing to harvest. Your job is to win battles and that's all you need to be concerned with.

When you first see someone playing EndWar it's immediately apparent that it's not a typical RTS game. This game is designed from the ground up to for consoles and it shows. The most noticeable difference between EndWar and other RTS games is the camera view. Your camera is pretty much always focused on whichever units you're commanding, so instead of a huge overhead view, you get what is basically a third-person view. You can rotate the camera to get a view of what's around the unit and switch to other units on the fly.

This leads us to what is easily EndWar's biggest draw: voice control. If you want to swap your view to a unit, you just say the unit number followed by "camera". So if you want to see Unit Two, you'd say, "Unit Two, Camera" and the camera will immediately switch to that unit. Pretty much the entire demo we saw at Leipzig was played via voice control and watching it work is amazing. Giving out orders looks fairly straightforward. You'll say, "Unit 2, attack Hostile 1" and your unit will carry out its orders accordingly. You can do everything from forming groups to calling in support all without touching the controller.

What's especially slick is watching the game process your voice commands. When you make a group the game will still display all the onscreen steps you'd take to do the same thing with your controller, only it'll do it automatically as per your instructions. Watching an array of menu items pop up on the HUD and highlight themselves is seriously cool.